GIMP has been around for over two decades and development has been stable over the years. The newest update for GIMP gives a slew of new features and a glimpse into the future for this incredible open source image editor.

Features

All the features of GIMP are still present. You can create your own images with tools for airbrushing, penciling, cloning, and creating gradients. Power users can create their own brushes and patterns to use later. GIMP also allows users to manipulate images imported into the program. You can crop, add text, resize, and create nested layers. There is even a way to animate your creations.

New additions

GIMP has now been updated with many user interface tweaks to make the application accessible to newbies. The biggest interface addition is the ability to edit in a single-window. GIMP versions of the past drew criticism for their confusing interfaces, but the developers are addressing many of these issues in this newest version. While single-window mode is great, it is also disappointing that there is no way to view multiple projects side by side.

Other updated features include easier text editing, nested layer groups, and a shift to using the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), which is a more sophisticated image processing framework. GEGL was introduced a couple of years back in a developer version and has now made its way into the sable, consumer version. GIMP developers hope to move entirely to GEGL by version 2.10. One of the major advantages of GIMP using GEGL is the ability for non-destructive editing and high bit-depth images.

GIMP now only saves to its own XCF format to retain layers and other file manipulation information. Users can still choose to save in formats like JPEG and PNG but will have to "export" the project instead of saving. This follows in the footsteps of Adobe Photoshop.

The latest GIMP is better than ever. Its developers are taking the user experience into serious consideration and are speeding up development for this already great photo editor.

Download GIMP 2.8.4 in Softonic

Extreme Quality The graphics engine works in 32 bit color, without loss of data, its accuracy is evident in the delicacy of nuance, in brilliant colors, in the absence of dithering artifacts. Speed++ The Engine XAI Brain 3 is programmed entirely in C + + with support for multi-core (dual core for the standard edition). What does this mean? The processing times are kept to a minimum, with application of the corrections in real time!

Passionate and Professional Photographer who want an easy to use photo retouch and photo album creator software.

Download GeniuX Photo EFX 3.09 in Softonic

Huge Open world

Need For Speed World features Palmont, the city from Need For Speed Carbon, and also Rockport from Most Wanted, which combine to make a huge world to explore. There's a night/day rotation, which makes it feel more dynamic. There are no pedestrians, and little traffic. This means you won't be interrupted too often when racing, but does make Need For Speed World feel a bit lifeless.

Car Shopping

Choose a car from a small range of not very exciting cars to start with, liek the Toyota Corolla or Mitsubishi Eclipse, then roam the huge Need For Speed World looking for races. These can be multi or single player, and get into chases with the cops. Evading the police and ranking in races gives you experience points and money, which in turn unlock better cars that you can buy in the Need For Speed World showroom.

Mods

Your cars can be modified with stickers, paint and decals, and power-ups can be chosen and purchased with in game money. Need For Speed World seems pretty stable, even with loads of players online. When you enter the open world you can't crash into other players, only the environment and other traffic. Online players can only push you around if you enter a race. The cars in Need For Speed World have the forgiving, arcade style handling that makes the franchise such fun to play.

There is online chat alongside the racing, and you can add friends and meet up to race them. Graphically Need For Speed World is ok, but looks a few years old. However, this means you don't need a super computer to play the game!

Overall

Need For Speed World is an impressive massively multiplayer online racing game, and although it looks a bit basic it's really playable.

Download Need For Speed World 1.8.40.1166 in Softonic

You've probably seen a ton of online racing games already, but Trackmania Nations Forever is quite different from anything you have seen so far.

To begin with, Trackmania Nations Forever is completely free. No trial periods, no disabled functions, no nagging windows. It's for you to play and enjoy for free, as long as you want, as much as you feel like it. Also, Trackmania Nations Forever is not that much about arriving first to the finish line, but rather about having fun along the way; hence the extensive social component of the game and the incredible jumps and spins you'll be able to perform. Last, but not least, it also enables you to customize the game, featuring a complete editor with which you can create not only tracks, but also design your very own car.

Trackmania Nations Forever includes three different gaming modes (Solo, Online and Party play) which give you a different approach to the game: you can either play against the PC and try to break your personal records, play with friends on the same computer or in a local area network or play against other Trackmania drivers from all over the world with its superb online multiplayer mode. The Solo mode works with a system based on medals (the best your racing times are, the more medals you get and the more tracks you unlock) while the Online mode uses a worldwide ranking to measure players's achievements.

In a way, we could say that the most important element in Trackmania Nations Forever is gameplay. Everything has been carefully planned and designed to be as easy for the player as possible: for example, you can register your profile by simple filling in a two-field form, or control the car with just the arrow keys. This simplicity is what makes the game so much fun and so wickedly addictive.

Despite this apparent simplicity, however, you'll find a very elaborate game. Track and car design are simple, but realistic and very accurate. An excellent soundtrack adds the final touch to a game that, in my opinion, sets a turning point in online racing games.

Trackmania Nations Forever is probably one of the greatest online racing games you'll ever see: fun races, customizable elements, an extensive user community and excellent gameplay.

Download Trackmania Nations Forever 2.11.26 in Softonic

One of the biggest complaints about the previous version, modo 501, was that character animation was noticeably absent. Luxology has addressed this complaint and have included character animations in modo 601. You can make static 3D models and flatten them for images or you can give life to your creations with the new character animation feature.

The features that made modo great are still here. The rendering engine is faster than ever, physics controls and fluid dynamics make your animations realistic, and the amazing Pixar subdivision surface modeling is still here, making your models much more efficient by reducing polygon count. If you are modeling people or animals, there is a new skin and hair shading and texture tool to make your characters photo-realistic.

modo also has a great community behind it that continue to develop kits for modo to expand its functionality and ease of use. Luxology also has a section on their site that allows uses to preview and purchase new kits.

Overall, its easy to see why modo 601 is the de facto 3D modeling application for professionals. Its ease of use and powerful feature set make it one of the best tools for artist and animators.

Download modo 601 in Softonic

Includes four additional tracks, which each challenge you to race at even more ridiculous speeds. To stand a chance, customize your ride with fresh and exclusive parts and give it one of the numerous custom paint jobs.

But don't forget to jump into a fresh driver outfit of your own!. All new "Detonator" game mode. 4 fresh tracks. A complete set of new vehicle parts.

10 new acheivements. New paint jobs and driver suits. Minimum System Requirements:Operating System: Windows XP (with SP3) or Windows Vista (with SP1) or Windows 7.

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3. 2 Ghz, Intel Pentium D 2. 66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better. Video card: 256 MB DirectX 10. compliant video card or DirectX 9.

0c. compliant card with Shader Model 3. 0 or higher. RAM: 1 GB Windows XP / 2 GB Windows Vista  / 2 GB Windows 7. Sound Card: DirectX 9. 0c Compatible Sound Card.

Hard Drive Space: 4 GB. Peripherals Supported: Windows-compliant keyboard, mouse, gamepads. Multiplay: Broadband connection and service required for multiplayer mode (for Internet multiplayer).

Multiplay: Broadband connection and service required for multiplayer mode (for Internet multiplayer).

Download Nail'd - Detonator Mode and Track Pack in Softonic

And what would a Roleplaying Shooter be without loot?. Borderlands. groundbreaking content generation system creates a near-endless variety of weapon and items to customize your character!

Players can join and leave other players' games at any time, or choose to face the challenges of. Borderlands. alone. All these features combine with a deep, rich fiction and a bold art style to create a breathtaking experience that challenges the conventions of modern shooters.

Co-op Design. Borderlands. is built from the ground up to be an exciting, intuitive co-operative experience for up to four players simultaneously that rewards players who work together and invest in co-op skills.

Split screen is also supported. FPS Gameplay. In this Roleplaying Shooter, choose from one of four distinct characters, each with their own individual skill sets.

As your character grows throughout this fast-paced FPS, you choose and customize your abilities to suit your style of play!. Art Style. The distinctive art style combines traditional rendering techniques with hand-drawn textures to paint a bold and eye-catching spin on the FPS game.

Vehicular Combats. Jump behind the wheel and engage in high-speed vehicle-to-vehicle combat, complete with modeling, spectacular explosions, and road-killed Skags!

. Frontier Planet. Search the wasteland planet of Pandora for the legendary Alien Vault. Fight your way through bandits, discover nine native (and aggressive) creatures, and help the few settlers on the planet in your search for a Vault rumored to contain a great prize - if it even exists !

. Gun Lust. Choose from literally hundreds of thousands of weapons, each with their own manufacturers, specifications, and advantages. The revolutionary content generation system guarantees that you'll find almost infinite tools of destruction to suit your play style.

The revolutionary content generation system guarantees that you'll find almost infinite tools of destruction to suit your play style.

Download Borderlands + DLC The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned in Softonic

Fasterfox is a simple add-on that allows dynamic speed increases via a prefetching mechanism. This speeds-up browsing by loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing in the background. This means that before you've even clicked on a link, Firefox has already loaded the page so it's instantly ready for surfing.

However, there is a drawback to pre-fetching which is that it does consume considerable bandwidth. If you're on a broadband connection on your own, this is no big deal but if you share a connection, or are working on a network connection, it may be a problem. If you're worried about this, you should check out Fasterfox Lite which allows you to control pre-fetching in Firefox.

Fasterfox allows a high degree of tweaking to network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. There's even a split-second page load timer which tests the effectiveness of your settings. Finally, there's also a handy popup blocker included in Fasterfox to block Flash popups.

There's very little to fault in Fasterfox. It may slightly increase the RAM usage of Firefox (like many add-ons) and consume bandwidth but the faster performance is definitely noticeable.

Download Fasterfox 2.0.0 in Softonic

Drawing is Fast: Curvy brings new speed to 3D modelling by letting you draw shapes straight into 3D. Create whole models with just a few strokes.

Sculpting 3D models for art and games is quick and hassle free. Painting is Easy: Colours and shapes are easy to work with using Curvy's artist friendly tools.

You can sketch and paint colours, forms and bumps directly onto your 3D models, and then export models and textures for use in other 3D software.

Download Aartform Curvy 3D 2.0 Pro 2.0.0 in Softonic

And it can search, open RFC document from Internet. Other features include section titles highlighting, multiple RFC documents viewing concurrently, colorful RFC document printing, and so on.

Snapshot: (Click to see the snapshot withoriginal size) Main Features:1. Browse RFC documents with section directory treesParses the original RFC file, and generates a section directory tree.

This processismore fast and precise than other RFC browsing softwares. 2. Support searching RFC document onlineJust input RFC number, RFC Assistant can help you find andopen the specified RFC document.

3. Section highlightingThe build-in RFC parsing engine recognizes section titles and makes them highlight. It also provides an interface to configure the color and font for each section title.

4. SpeedyThe speed RFC Assistant analyzes, parses and displays a RFC document is very fast. Currently, it should be the fastest RFC browsing utility according to my test.

5. Low memory and disk space occupiedThe average memory size occupied by RFC Assistant is only 7400K bytes when opening RFC2801. 6. View multiple documents 7.

Full supporting file drag-drop operationThrough draging a RFC file to the window, theicon ofRFC Assistant, it can be opened easily. 8. Colorful Print Print previewWith supporting WYSWYG, the printed RFC document on paper is as same as what it is in RFC Assistant.

9. Skin supported high-efficiency UIpaintingRFCAssistant provides four color themes for changing its look. And its UI painting speed is fast too,you can not see that it twinkles like other RFC browsing softwares when repainting.

Download RFC Assistant 1.0 in Softonic

Hitware Companion helps protect your privacy by totally erasing your browser, windows and applications traces from your computer. By erasing IE location bar history, cache, history, unwanted cookies, autocomplete history, windows temp, search files history, find computer history, run history, telnet history, recent documents and much more.

Hitware companion also help erasing your Media Player, RealOne, Acrobat Reader, ACDSee, InfranView, MS Word, MS Paint, Winrar, Power DVD and MS imaging tracks.

Hitware Companion intelligently eliminates all unwanted pop-up and pop-under ads even before they appear. Helping you save Internet bandwidth and speed up your browsing experience.

Download Hitware Companion 3.1 in Softonic

This tool supports a dual-processor and has a very high processing speed. Noiseware Standard Plug-in for Windows is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.

0 and CS, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2. 0 and 3. 0, Corel Paint Shop Pro 8, 9, and X and Ulead Photo Impact 8, XL and 10. It can work without any adware or spyware because it is a stand- alone software product.

It can also automatically clean up files which are processed incorrectly. Noiseware Standard Plug-in for Windows also saves the entire processing configuration from the last run and automatically loads them on the start-up.

Download Noiseware Standard Plug-in for Windows 4.1.1 in Softonic

You select your effect from a simple menu structure and can then change a wealth of settings custom tailored to the specific effect. This plug-in includes all the effects from the famous UnPlugged series but with better quality, higher speed and more options; a must have for the power user.

Download UnPlugged-X Plug-in v2.1.68 in Softonic

It then starts to paint the picture on a blank canvas. Painting Pictures Screensaver for Windows allows you to try different painting methods and lets you control the speed and filter of the program.

You can also choose to accompany your screensaver with different MIDI music. Painting Pictures Screensaver for Windows includes many great artworks for you to use.

You can also include your own set of photos from your computer or from the Internet. This application centers the picture on your screen at all times so the size of your picture or resolution is not important.

This product can be used by people who want to enjoy watching different graphics and paintings come to life as screen savers on their computers.

Download Painting Pictures Screensaver in Softonic

Easy Screen Capture and Annotation lets you capture and annotate any part of the screen. The main goal of the product is to speed up the capture and editing process saving you valuable time by automating repetitive tasks. Selecting a region directly on the screen or pointing only a menu, window or control at the moment of capture is just one of those features that will accelerate your workflow.

You can easily create explicit and stylish captures by editing the captured images and also adding descriptions using text balloons (callouts), arrows and other objects. The assignable keyboard hotkeys let you capture the screen instantaneously at any point of your work. A rich and intuitive interface provides you with the common features available in the leading image processing products.

Those include cropping, resizing, painting, drawing shapes, filling with colors, different image effects, transparency, shadows and many more. You have the power of image processing software and a screen capture utility in a single lightweight product. It will help you to create dazzling captures with as little effort as possible and save them in all known popular image formats. The product is easy for the novice users, and yet powerful enough for the advanced ones.

Download Easy Screen Capture And Annotation 2.5.0.0 in Softonic

We're all used to managing bullets, grenades and knives in first person shooters. But what if paint was your main ammo?

This is precisely the idea behind Tag: The Power of Paint. This original game, developed by a group of students of the Digipen Institute of Technology, challenges you to find your way through several levels in a mixture between puzzles, platform games and shooters. The trick is using paint to obtain different powers: green makes you jump, red boosts your speed and blue allows you to stick to the surface.

All you have to do is grab your machine gun – which looks more like one of those guns used in paintball games - and start making your way through each level in the game, using each color as you need it.

Tag: The Power of Paint is generally easy to play. Some puzzles are quite challenging at first, but once you get the knack of it the whole adventure runs smoothly – in fact you'll have the impression that it's too short. Also, I missed having at least a few enemies to wipe out, which would definitely make the game more exciting.

Tag: The Power of Paint is an original blend of puzzles, platformers and first person shooters in which the main ammunition is paint.

Download TAG: The Power of Paint in Softonic

Editing your icons can be one of the best ways of giving your desktop and PC a really individual feel.

Microsoft has always provided some pretty uninspiring icons for all Windows releases and this program is aimed at giving them an extra touch of class. The good thing about IconEdit is that it accepts a huge range of icons formats from ICO, ICL, NIL, EXE and DLL to GIF, TIFF, BMP, and JPEG. It's also extremely easy to use even if the interface is a bit bland. Normally icon sizes are 32x32 pixels, 16x16 and in some rare cases, 48x48 for really big ones. The different size ranges require different tools to edit them effectively and IconEdit2 allows you to do so with speed and a touch of finesse even if you're no Picasso. The interface is similar to Window's own Paint application and the program allows you to modify desktop shortcuts and folder icons as well as substitute your own images instead of the default ones. You can also use it to create convincing Avatars that can be used with IM clients and forum sites. Probably the nicest feature for an imaging novice is the option to create a "transparent" background for any image or icon which usually takes longer in other similar apps.

This is an excellent icon editor that's simple to use but gives you just enough creative scope to make some really natty icons.

Download IconEdit2 6.3 in Softonic

I'm always looking for new ways to speed up taking screenshots and the less mouse clicks the better in my opinion.

That's why Desktop Screenshot Whiz rates highly for me because it reduces screenshot taking to a simple press of the Print Screen key. Simply by hitting this key, the screen that you've currently got open is captured and opened in Desktop Screenshot Whiz which then offers you a range of editing options. This basically means you can select a certain region of the screen or take the whole screen. The program supports all of the major image formats and importantly, also allows you to apply text and some basic shaping effects such as adding triangles, squares and rectangles. You can improve the image quality with a few post processing effects such as filters. The program sits discreetly in the system tray in between captures which you can save to file, print immediately or save to the clipboard. The program wins lots of points for its ease of use, configuration and save options but the editing options are too limited to make it a great screenshot tool. Even basic tools such as a spray paint option or erasing tool are not available but if it's speed you're looking for, it's just the ticket.

A quick and easy screenshot tool that just needs more editing options to make it more useful and competitive compared to it's rivals.

Download Desktop Screenshot Whiz in Softonic

If you yearn for the classroom environment, then you'll love NetPen. NetPen allows you to use a virtual whiteboard across a network as if you were in a classroom.

This is a great program if you just want to have a bit of doodling fun with friends or collaborate on a project across a network. The tools are pretty simple - a pen, a whiteboard and an eraser although there are a few added extras such as a spray can and paint function. The program allows multiple users to connect so that you can have as many people as you want join but it doesn't hog bandwidth because it only runs through one port. There are a very limited amount of colours in the palette but on the plus side, it does assist you in drawing various shapes and colours. There are a few useful keyboard shortcuts too to speed up time such as the delete key to erase drawings and pasting (CTRL+V or CTRL+INS) or copy (CTRL+C) and a grid can be toggled on and off. It can also be set to auto-delete drawing at a set time so that instead of having to delete anything, it does it for you which is useful for if you're having to conduct a meeting although not so good if you've just drawn a work of art and it disappears suddenly!

NetPen is a fun and useful utility for all those that look back with nostalgia at the days when learning was done primarily with a whiteboard and marker pen.

Download NetPen 0.90 Beta in Softonic

Knowing how to convert video files to Flash is almost necessary nowadays, as Adobe's video format is quickly becoming the dominant one on the net. Working as any other converter, Video2SWF has the advantage of outputting not only to swf but also to flv and html. It supports most of the video and audio formats out there, though we were disappointed to find out that audio mpeg was not handled.

Settings is probably where Video2SWF packs the most features. Not only can you select in and out points for your videos, but you can also add overlay, and a few filters. The program also has a choice of half a dozen different video controls to add to your video. If you work with multiple video files, you'll be glad to know that you can batch convert them.

Performance is where Video2SWF underachieves, with pretty slow conversion speeds though, even for fairly small videos.

Video2SWF is a flash converter with lots of extra settings but a tad slow in the conversion process.

Download Video2SWF 1.011 in Softonic